I am testing Norton Ghost 15.According to what I have read, you can do a copy of an entire hard drive to another hard drive and it should boot (if you choose those options).

In the test case, I am attempting to create a copy of a hard drive with a clean install of Windows XP. The copy completes, but when I try to boot from it, it simply hangs at the Windows Desktop loading screen or reboots over and over.

Any thoughts on this or recommendations for a better solution would be greatly appreciated.

Well, now that you mention that the disks are different sizes, I would recommend that you do a disk to disk, and not allow the partitions to be resized.

Also, be wary of the sata compatibility settings, usually in the BIOS. Sometimes sata controllers have to be set back to legacy/compatibility mode, as well. It sounds like drive size might be being a problem for you.

I'm trying to get our Windows 2000 webserver onto a new box because I just found out we've got to limp along on it almost another year. Who woulda thought Windows 2000 couldn't boot from a volume over 7GB, that's so small! ;)

Ralph, if the chipsets are not compatible, then he would get a 0x0000007B error message on a BSOD. Recreating the pagefile will sometimes work in this case but if that fails to work, then boot to console and do FIXBOOT & FIXMBR. ;)

The work around for incompatible chipsets is to boot to console and follow these steps:
ren c:\Windows\System32\Config\system system.old
cd c:\Windows\Repair
copy system c:\Windows\System32\Config\
quit

Well, now that you mention that the disks are different sizes, I would recommend that you do a disk to disk, and not allow the partitions to be resized.

Also, be wary of the sata compatibility settings, usually in the BIOS. Sometimes sata controllers have to be set back to legacy/compatibility mode, as well. It sounds like drive size might be being a problem for you.

I'm trying to get our Windows 2000 webserver onto a new box because I just found out we've got to limp along on it almost another year. Who woulda thought Windows 2000 couldn't boot from a volume over 7GB, that's so small! ;)

Well nothing has worked. I am about to toss this one into the fail box and move on to a different program. I wish they would have designed this one a bit more user friendly as we have run into many "snags" with trying to get Norton to work.